Shayne Looper: Hereafter or heretofore: A matter of life and death

Shayne Looper

Friday

Oct 22, 2010 at 12:01 AMOct 22, 2010 at 9:15 PM

In the new movie “Hereafter,” director Clint Eastwood explores issues of life and death — and life after death. Each of the movie’s main characters has been in a collision with death. “Hereafter” explores the aftermath of such a collision.

In the new movie “Hereafter,” director Clint Eastwood explores issues of life and death — and life after death. Each of the movie’s main characters has been in a collision with death. “Hereafter” explores the aftermath of such a collision.

Eastwood himself admits to being agnostic about the hereafter. He told the LA Weekly, “Mankind doesn’t seem to be willing to accept that this is your life and you should do the best you can with it and enjoy it while you’re here, and that’ll be enough. [People think] there has to be immortality or eternal life and embracing some religious thing. I don’t have the answer.”

Or maybe he does and doesn’t know it. A wise man told us long ago that God has “set eternity in the hearts of men.” Maybe that is the reason mankind isn’t “willing to accept” that this is all there is. And maybe that is the reason the 80-year-old Eastwood made this movie.

Have you noticed that Hollywood’s representations of the hereafter are almost always drab? There is the classic version — a girl in white, reclining on a cloud, plucking a small harp. And there is the classical (ancient Greek) version — a pervasive darkness, filled with the inarticulate voices of people who have been reduced to empty shells of their former selves.

Then we have the “Heaven Can Wait,” “Ghost” and “Sixth Sense” take on the afterlife. These films feature people who just won’t — or can’t — go away. They stick around their old haunts, at least until some obstacle to their advancement is removed — usually the undoing of an evil they have done or the dispensation of justice for an evil done to them.

These movies — with souls trapped on earth until wrongs are righted — are really about this life, not the afterlife. It is telling that such movies break down the moment the wrong is righted and the soul is released to its eternal destiny. The story usually ends lamely with the protagonist walking into an antiseptic bright light or standing on a tranquil beach.

Clearly filmmakers don’t know what to do with the hereafter. In movies, heaven is almost always the least heavenly thing about the afterlife. It is vague, blurry and ... boring.

The Christian view is very different. Whereas filmmakers see heaven as the consolation prize for those who don’t make the cut on Earth, the Bible sees it as the grand prize. Had Warren Beatty’s character caught even a glimpse of the real thing, heaven would never have had to wait.

Most film makers find heaven too tame to be interesting, but the biblical data suggest just the opposite. After St. Paul’s brief sojourn there (whether in the body or not, he wasn’t sure), he reported having heard things that he couldn’t express and wasn’t at liberty to describe. Heaven was what “no mind has conceived.” Whatever else heaven was, it wasn’t boring.

The biblical heaven is dazzling. It is colorful. It is loud and joyful — the most common scriptural metaphor for heaven is a party or feast. And it is peopled both with intelligent, non-human creatures (no one would call them boring) and with old friends.

In the movies, whenever the scene changes to heaven, things get blurry and vague. This, I think, must be the opposite of what really happens. Heaven will bring clarity, like a sleeper waking from a dream, like a near-sighted man putting on his glasses. Heaven will make sense, it will be clear, while earth, as C. S. Lewis once suggested, “will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place.”

And here lies the problem with most films about the afterlife. The perspective is all wrong. They take for granted that heaven (or hell) is the hereafter, when in reality Earth is the “heretofore.” Earth plays an important role in our lives because it is heaven’s womb. But when we are in heaven, we will not want to return to this life any more than we now want to return to the womb. Better — and more exciting — things await than we have known heretofore.

Shayne Looper is the pastor at the Lockwood Community Church in Coldwater, Mich. He can be reached at salooper@dmcibb.net.

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